This year we have presented our research work at Black Hat USA 2012, the leading information security conference. Our researchers Patroklos Argyroudis and Chariton Karamitas visited Caesar’s Palace at Las Vegas, Nevada and delivered the talk.

Specifically, the presentation was divided into three parts. The first part comprised of an introduction to the jemalloc memory allocator and presented its architecture, its fundamental concepts and its management data structures.

The second part of the presentation focused on identifying attack vectors against the allocator and on the development of novel exploitation approaches and primitives that can be used to attack jemalloc heap corruption vulnerabilities.

In the third and final part, our researchers applied these primitives to manipulate the heap of the Mozilla Firefox browser and to develop a PoC exploit for vulnerability CVE-2011-3026 (demonstrated on Firefox). Furthermore, a utility (unmask_jemalloc) was released that can be used to aid the process of exploit development for jemalloc/Firefox vulnerabilities.

Our presentation was 1 of 5 selected to be part of the “Breaking Things” track of the Black Hat conference. After the talk, our researchers participated in the press conference for the “Breaking Things” track and answered questions related to the impact of the presented work and its consequences.

Updated Presentation Material

All material from our presentation are provided below in the hope that they will be useful to security researchers willing to continue our work.